The Lexmark Prospect Pro205 is a solid light-duty MFP that provides fax features for a home office.

The Lexmark Prospect Pro205 ($169 direct) is one of Lexmark's Professional series of office inkjet printers, and it has its share of business-friendly features: fax capabilities, an automatic document feeder and auto-duplexer among them. However, its limited paper capacity, though consigns it to very light-duty office use in a home or micro office. It could double as a home and home-office printer, if your family is not too picky about photo quality.

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The Pro205 can print, copy, scan, and fax. It includes a 35-sheet automatic document feeder (ADF), for scanning or copying multi-page documents. It has an automatic duplexer for printing on both sides of a sheet of paper. However, its 100-sheet input capacity is on the low side, even for home-office use.

The Pro205 is coffee colored, with a silver top. Its tilt-up front panel holds a 2.4-inch color LCD, fax keypad, 4-way controller, and various function buttons. To the right of the panel are slots for USB key and memory cards. The machine is reasonably compact at 8 by 18.8 by 14.1 inches (HWD), and weighs 18 pounds. Connectivity is either by a USB cable or via Wi-Fi. I tested it over a USB connection with a printer running Windows Vista.

Speed and Output Quality
The Lexmark Prospect Pro205 printed out the latest version of our business applications suite (timed with QualityLogic's hardware and software) at a 2.3 effective pages per minute (ppm). The suite consists of a mixture of text pages, graphics pages, and ones with mixed content. Its speed is fairly typical for an MFP in its price range. The Editors' Choice Epson Stylus NX625 ($149.99 direct, 4 stars) zipped through the same tests at 4 ppm while the Lexmark Interact S605 ($199 direct, 3.5 stars) and Kodak ESP 7250 ($199.99 direct, 3 stars) were clocked at 2.7 and 2.8 ppm, respectively. Several recent inkjets priced at around $100 have been much slower than the Pro205; one took nearly twice as long to print out the same suite.

The Pro205's text quality was average for an inkjet. It was good enough to be used for internal business documents, but you might not want to use it for a resume or other document you want to visually make a good impression with.

Graphics quality was on a par with the vast majority of inkjet MFPs we've tested; that is, good enough for schoolwork or internal business use, including PowerPoint handouts. Issues of note, all minor, included banding (regular stripes of slight discoloration); posterization (colors changing abruptly where they should do so gradually); and uneven ink distribution in some solid areas.

Photo quality was a little below par for an inkjet MFP. Most, but not all, of the prints were of a quality typical of drugstore prints. Colors were well saturated, a bit on the punchy side but not overly so. One outdoor image showed a discolored sky. Other issues included dithering (graininess), posterization, and a loss of some fine detail such as very thin lines. Though you might not want to frame the Pro205's prints, photo output was good enough for internal business uses such as printing out Web pages.

The Lexmark Prospect Pro205 is a solid if light-duty MFP with a decent feature set for a home office that requires fax capabilities, and can even double as a home printer. Its business-printing speed and output quality are typical of inkjets in its price range. Although it doesn't stand out from the crowd, it has no glaring weaknesses, either. But should something go wrong, it has that 5-year warranty to back it up.

About the Author

As Analyst for printers, scanners, and projectors, Tony Hoffman tests and reviews these products and provides news coverage for these categories. Tony has worked at PC Magazine since 2004, first as a Staff Editor, then as Reviews Editor, and more recently as Managing Editor for the printers, scanners, and projectors team.
In addition to editing, T... See Full Bio

Lexmark Prospect Pro205

Lexmark Prospect Pro205

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